David Naylor had a piece recently on optimizing your photos for search engines. The piece got me thinking, so I Googled myself at Google images. I had to laugh...

Twenty pictures. Eleven are headshots of me from blogs and webpages. Four are pictures of friends on taken from my different social network profiles. And five are randon graphics off pages where I created content - including one of a serial killer named Charles Sobhraj.

We all know that pictures have been an important part of the Internet for a decade or more. But the art of searching pictures is becoming more and more sophisticated. Pictures have slowly moved from being entertaining to being information.

David's short piece looks at image optimization in Google. It's an interesting piece that may get your images a better ranking in Google. It's got me thinking a little more seriously about it, at least.

I'm sitting here looking at Facebook because, well, isn't everyone?

Reuters had a piece recently on how Facebook is on the way to becoming a "technological lock-in" on a par with the QWERTY keyboard.

"I think Facebook is the most valuable Internet commodity in existence, more so than Google, because they are positioning themselves to be our online identity via Facebook connect," Ravasio said. "It's your real name, it's your real friends..."

Of course, we had a different word for that a few years ago: MySpace.

The brief history of the Internet is littered with the ghosts of Websites that people have abandoned in their relentless pursuit of something newer, faster, better and cooler.

That's not quite MySpace yet. According to Reuters, MySpace still gets 57 million visitors a month - almost three times what Twitter gets. And Twitter's big, right? But Facebook is getting about 112 million visitors a month. And on average, Facebook visitors spend twice as much time on the Facebook site as MySpace visitor spend there.

TechCrunch recently interviewed Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Watch the interview, below...

Twitter is starting to go local - and that could make it much more useful.

I like Twitter. But finding people who live in my general area has always been difficult. Local trends on Twitter will hopefully be a step toward resolving that.

Small Business Trends is excited about the business implicatins of a local push for Twitter.

There was a lot of buzz going into the weekend about a new Twitter addition called Twitter Local Trends and how this could help business owners find out what's hot in their local area. We touched on the importance of location-based apps last week while mentioning Yelp's new check-in service and this is just another example of things taking a more 'local' turn in 2010. And if Twitter builds this out the way I hope they will, Local Trends could open may very impressive doors.

Finding a way to tie Twitter more closely to geography can only make it more popular.

© Gauldo


The Rumpus claims to have an unauthorized interview with an anonymous Facebook employee. And according to that anonymous Facebook employee, Facebook "is recording data on everything you do on the site. Everything. And not just the messages you've written and received either: it knows how many times you've clicked on your friend's profile, which photos you've viewed, and more."

TechCrunch has a nice summary of the 3,000-word Rumpus piece. It alos says that Facebook employees once had a master password which would all allow them access to to any users profile and personal data.

It will be interesting to see how much attention this get and whether any of it is ever verified.

If you decided to try social networking and then decided you really didn't like it, you've probably figured out that there is no going back - at least for some of the social networks. And with Facebook in particular, completely removing your profile is pretty much impossible.

Enterthe Web 2.0 Suicide Machine...

LifeHacker described the new digital suicide machine earlier this month. Sign up for it and it will delete your friends, change your username (and not tell you what the new one is), change you password (and, again, not tell you what the new one is), and substitute a new image for your profilc picture. That's a lot more profound that simply "deactivating" your profile. After all, Facebook just knows you'll regret leaving in a few days and reativate your account (by just logging in).

It only took a few days for the people at Facebook to figure out how to block the application - raising new questions about privacy, and just how owns your profile...